There are many other women writers who remain entirely overlooked, and whom present readers would doubtless enjoy and learn from. And one candidate worthy of being fished from the seas of oblivion and dragged into the literary lifeboat is Ethel Carnie Holdsworth.

I fear the reason why Carnie Holdsworth hasn't yet proved an attractive prospect for the missionary feminist is that she was trenchantly working class. Carnie Holdsworth wrote stories for and about other working-class women; women who, like herself, were already working long hours in factories and at home. With no allowance to free up her time, nor a high level of education, she had an urgent need to show how it was for herself and women like her. It's a very old plough, this; the absence of, and then, when she is there, the neglect of, the working-class woman. One of the reasons I am championing Carnie Holdsworth is because we share class origins; origins that make one only too aware of how hard it is to even realise that one could have a voice through the pen. But that's not all: a survey of Carnie Holdsworth's work makes all too clear her struggle and her significant achievements, which, in the end, wore her out.

Carnie Holdsworth was born in Lancashire in 1886, and her father often took her to socialist meetings. It was not enough to keep her, at age 11, from taking a part-time job in a textiles factory, going full-time two years later. She started writing poetry, using her factory-girl status as a marketing tool – although the poetry itself was abstract, concerned with beauty and happiness, as though keen to demonstrate that those in factories were also capable of what were seen as the finer feelings. It was enough to attract the attention of Robert Blatchford, a founder of the Clarion movement and the Independent Labour party, who offered her a job writing on his London-based magazine the Woman Worker. If he thought Carnie Holdsworth would stick to penning harmless abstractions, however, he was wrong. Her journalism, like the novels she would go on to write, was concerned with working-class socialist feminism.

She stayed in the job just seven months; her role was then filled by Blatchford's daughter, and the magazine renamed Women Folk. The nepotism and the name change, reflecting a more genteel approach, suggest that Carnie Holdsworth was ruffling feathers simply by writing about what she had come from and using her new public voice to tell working-class women to "go out and play".

After her foray into journalism, Carnie Holdsworth returned to Lancashire and decided poetry no longer met her expressive needs. She combined the writing of her first novel, Miss Nobody (1913), with shop work and attending lectures at Manchester's Owens College. Over the next 20 years, she wrote 10 novels, and also set up and edited the Clear Light, an anti-fascist journal that was ahead of its time. But at just 46 she stopped novel-writing. Her daughter later reported to labour historian Ruth Frow that Ethel had felt "worn out" by them. Why?

The novel, a native medium for middle-class writers such as Townsend Warner, had long been a struggle for a woman who was trying to find ways of expressing the lives of those around her. The form had risen with the birth of the middle-class and had been overwhelmingly used to chart their concerns. It was the critic Raymond Williams who found that, for the working classes, "the novel, with its quite different narrative forms, was virtually impenetrable for three or four generations".

Sensing this, Carnie Holdsworth attempted to create a new form, using what I see as a mix of the New Woman and the Chartist novels, wedded to auto/biography – or even journalism. Her work cannot be categorised as romance; in fact, the difficulty of categorising her work at all may explain her neglect. Personally, I think it is best defined as autobiografiction. The topic was recently taken up by Max Saunders, but, typically, for the middle-class modernist cause, even though the definition was first used for The Poor Man's House by Stephen Reynolds in 1912 – another case of attention being usurped from working-class literary heritage.

What we need more than ever in our current climate are works that reflect these levels of inequality – not just between men and women, but between women and women – and north and south. I have often found it ironic that the feminists who cry foul at patriarchal cultural imperialism and the championing of male writers at the expense of better women, then go on to repeat the process among women along class lines, whether they know it or not.